Saturday, May 23, 2015

2015 read #25: Diamond Mask by Julian May.

Diamond Mask by Julian May
461 pages
Published 1994
Read from May 15 to May 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Milieu baaaabiiies
We make our dreams come truuue
Milieu baaaabiiies
Teilhard's Omega Point too!
Yeah, I dunno. The second book in the Galactic Milieu Trilogy inches us closer, in years, to the start of the Galactic Rebellion, but yet again dawdles about showing us scenes from the childhood of its titular paramount metapsychic operant, as well as a protracted psycho killer plotline that has not transmuted into interesting in between volumes. May's narrator, Uncle Rogi, promised that Diamond Mask would track down the metapsychic killers Fury and Hydra in this volume, but alas, actually resolving this plotline did not seem to be May's intention. We were promised that we would actually see the Galactic Rebellion in the final volume of the series devoted to the Galactic Rebellion, but with the psycho killers still on the loose, I don't hold out much hope for nuanced character-based conflict and scenes of spectacular space opera.

Diamond Mask is a minuscule improvement over Jack the Bodiless by virtue of moving much of the action off Earth and onto colorful exoplanets -- no more in utero discussions of divinity and incarnation while Bigfeet peep in the window of a Canadian manger, thankfully. But the need for a good chunk of these scenes never becomes clear. The Family Ghost may insist that Dorothea needs to grow up on the "Scottish" planet Caledonia, but all we see is her getting dropped off, meeting some broad caricatures, and then her leaving again a few years later. I think that it's May who "needed" Dorothea to grow up on Caledonia, because she had this nice nifty planet she wanted to describe in detail. Worldbuilding as substitute for character development.

Character development does not seem to be May's strength in general. Her villains are motivated by pop psychology: forgotten childhood molestation gives rise to a murderously unsubtle "Fury," while the future leader of the Rebellion only reaches that point because he was tempted by a proverbial devil on his shoulder. I may be grading this too generously. But at least it held my interest somewhat better than Jack, and best of all, I'm only one additional volume away from finishing this series once and for all. Maybe the next one will have some kind of payoff.

Friday, May 15, 2015

2015 read #24: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
328 pages
Published 2013
Read from May 13 to May 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Why do people read trash when things so much better are available?

Well, I shouldn't talk; I've persevered through my share of hack sci-fi for no better reason than it had dinosaurs on the cover. What I mean is, why do people enjoy trash, why do they seek it out and devour it and make multibillion-dollar multimedia empires out of vampires hanging out in high schools, when books like Eleanor & Park exist?

Rainbow Rowell is doing all right for herself. I may not have heard of her, or of this book, before Monday, but she has some successful novels out there, and at least one movie deal. It's not as if I've ever paid attention to the contemporary YA scene -- there could be all kinds of books this excellent, and I wouldn't know about them until someone recommended them, or until they made some kind of "top banned books of the year" list. But that's the thing, isn't it? Why is this level of quiet, emotionally acute brilliance seemingly unknown outside its genre boundaries? Why does this lack crossover status, when every half-literate suburban mom who hadn't touched a book since high school knows about Twilight and its imitators?

Or maybe I'm just especially ignorant about books outside of my narrow province. Also possible.

I wonder, though: What is the intended audience for YA fiction, really? Do high school kids actually know about books like this? Or is it all college students, librarians, teachers, and people on Tumblr? It almost feels like this book was written, in Eleanor's apt description of Romeo and Juliet, for people who want to remember being young and in love. I had a hard time picturing actual teenagers connecting to it -- but I'm probably underestimating teenagers. I know I liked to read as a teen, and I couldn't have been the only one. But this book felt like it was written just as much for a wistful, nostalgic adult audience as a teenage one. Not that I'm complaining.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

2015 read #23: Jack the Bodiless by Julian May.

Jack the Bodiless by Julian May
464 pages
Published 1991
Read from May 2 to May 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Contains spoilers for the Saga of Pliocene Exile (1, 2, 3, 4) and Intervention.

Expectation: Jack the Bodiless is the first volume in a trilogy depicting humanity's Metapsychic Rebellion against the power and dominion of the Galactic Milieu, a saga of space war and psychokinetic conflict hinted at in May's Saga of Pliocene Exile. May sketched the happy and prosperous Milieu after the resolution of the Rebellion in the early pages of The Many-Colored Land, and introduced the Remillards and "the Adversary," Marc Remillard, in the final two volumes, so before we even begin this new trilogy, we know the resolution of the major plot threads (Saint Jack the Bodiless saves Galactic Unity but gives his life in the process; Marc Remillard and his inner circle go into Pliocene exile, where "the Adversary" is eventually redeemed, and in a fit of starry-eyed idealism, psychically projects himself into a neighboring galaxy, where five million years later he will emerge as Atoning Unifex, the "Family Ghost" of the Remillards who nudges events into their "necessary" course). But May surprised me in Intervention with her ability to keep me invested in a story whose major beats I already know, even in spite of an unnecessary and uninteresting subplot about psychotic psychic serial killers. So I went into Jack the Bodiless expecting a rousing tale of conflict and idealism and massively overpowered psychic titans battling across the arm of the galaxy.

Reality: Jack the Bodiless pretty much blows.

The first sign of trouble comes with the sketchy political and gendered implications of the opening plot. During the Saga, I noticed May's tendency to assign her female characters subservient or supportive roles: as I noted in my review of The Adversary, "[A]fter all the troubling gender politics in the previous volumes, perhaps it's no surprise that the central conflict is resolved when a powerful female protagonist finally, contentedly relinquishes control and assumes a subsidiary role to a more powerful male." The first 300 pages of Jack the Bodiless depict a woman, irrationally driven to save her dying marriage, becoming pregnant in defiance of a Galactic statute designed to weed harmful alleles out of the human breeding pool. That could be read as a defense of reproductive self-determination -- except Teresa becomes essentially passive after getting pregnant, and her 13 year old son Marc is the one who organizes and effects her escape from Milieu justice. Her unborn fetus is of course Jack, the super-psychic galactic savior, and he and Teresa have in utero dialogues about Christianity and the necessity for a loving creator god to become incarnate and push humanity toward a Teilhardian Omega Point. Plenty of sci-fi books have taken Tielhard and the Omega Point for inspiration, but May might be the first in my experience to explicitly declare Christianity "true" in her story universe.

These gender and ideological issues are exacerbated by the in-universe racial implications of the events of the Saga of Pliocene Exile. At the end of those books, the metapsychic potential of the hominid genepool is augmented and accelerated by cross-breeding with psychic faeries from another galaxy (it's a long story). But those faeries settled Pliocene Europe, and continued mating with "Celtic" humans into the dawn of history, so Western Europeans far surpass the other human "races" in metapsychic development by the time Jack the Bodiless begins. One might even say that Western Europeans, in this story universe, represent a sort of master race of psychic operants. That may have been matter-of-course for sci-fi when The Many-Colored Land was first printed in 1981, but even by 1991 it had to have looked awkward, and here in 2015 it's downright odious.

Plenty of sci-fi books can still be entertaining despite despicable racial and gender ideology -- I mean, that encompasses practically every sci-fi book published before 1980, and most of them afterward. Where Jack the Bodiless truly fails is its lack of entertainment. Like so many genre books from the '80s and '90s, including Intervention, Jack wastes time with a superfluous and shoehorned "psycho killer" plotline. I guess a tale of galactic strife and a clash of metapsychic titans isn't enough to sustain a trilogy, so all that gets shuffled off to the ensuing volumes while the Remillards investigate a psychic serial killer. And once the pointless mystery of the psycho killers (five kids operating in metaconcert, because of course the only thing more '80s and '90s than an extraneous serial killer is a bunch of killer children) is resolved, the four surviving killers go into hiding, and the narrator promises to address their denouement in the next book, so we aren't even finished with this ridiculous nonsense.

Speaking of unresolved plotlines, Teresa and Intervention narrator Rogi Remillard hide from the Galactic authorities during her pregnancy in a Bigfoot preserve in British Columbia. No real reason for it -- just "Hey, have some Bigfeet while this story spins its wheels." Unless this is a long range Chekhov's Bigfoot, to be resolved in some ensuing volume, nothing whatsoever happens with the Bigfoot storyline. They exist as mere set dressing.

There is just enough here -- just barely enough -- to keep me from despising Jack outright, and just barely enough of interest to keep me going into the next book of the trilogy. Perhaps this is merely a series low point, a bunch of dull table-setting that should have taken only a hundred or so pages, sort of like the Saga low point, The Nonborn King. Let's hope Diamond Mask has more momentum and less extraneous garbage -- though if narrator Rogi is to be believed, we won't even get to the Metapsychic Rebellion until the final book of the trilogy.

Friday, May 1, 2015

2015 read #22: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd.

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd
185 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 25 to May 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

"Time is eternal and simultaneous." Such is written on the endsheet of this particular library copy. This approximation of profundity was jotted down in response to a passage late in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, in which Ackroyd has his narrator Wilde recount,
'I will tell you a secret,' I said to him. 'I have told you that our age is primitive and terrible. Well, the next age will be primitive also, and then the next, and then the next.'

Dante walks in exile at the same time as Augustine speaks in market place of Tyre, and Samson is led into the air by a boy. There is a picture of a young man in the Louvre -- a prince, I believe, and his eyes are sad. I would like to see that picture again before I die. I would like to return to that past -- to enter another man's heart. In that moment of transition, when I was myself and someone else, of my own time and in another's, the secrets of the universe would stand revealed.
The beauty, and occasionally the frustration, of literary fiction is that few things are spelled out, and each reader fashions their own understanding from the impressions presented. I certainly would not extract some pop science pseudo-physics mysticism from the above passage. Hewing close to the obvious themes, I thought instead of the isolation of the artist and the critic of society, the "primitive" and "terrible" human society which, for all its cosmetic shifts, changes not at all in how it seizes upon and hounds the outsider.

I haven't read much at all of Wilde's actual work -- only The Picture of Dorian Grey, and that was eleven years ago. Ackroyd excels in his pastiche of Wilde's style and quickness with an epigram, as far as I can tell; the first half or so of the book had me giggling with every page. But, as is my common reaction to Ackroyd's recent history digests, I came away from this Testament not feeling I had learned anything much about Wilde as a person. Ackroyd's Wilde returns to themes of masks, of identity, of art and beauty as ideals, and either I'm too dense or my attention was too scattered to appreciate it, because I didn't feel like those themes got developed or elaborated beyond a Cliffs Notes sketch. The ending was affecting, and much of the early going was delightfully wry, but I just didn't click with this read as a whole.